Academic Quotes

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

In its most basic sense, organizational memory refers to stored information from an organization's history that can be brought to bear on present decisions. This information is stored as a consequence of implementing decisions to which they refer, by individual recollections, and through shared interpretations.

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don't stop for customs inspections and microbes don't carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

Benjamin Barber

If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they're defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles.... When prodded, they'll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations.

Cultural elites in countries that dominate peoples have adapted subject people's religion for their own purposes.

Richard A. Horsley

Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity.

In the natural sciences as in more practical affairs, how we have arrived is as important as where we have arrived.

Ernest Fox Nichols

Human sexuality is... a long way from the depositing of seminal fluid, like squirting jam in a donut.

The hero [of a narrative] must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female.... The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter.

Teresa de Lauretis

In an examination those who do not wish to know ask questions of those who cannot tell.

Walter Raleigh (professor)

What did you know about Uzbekistan once you learned that Old Uzbek had a hundred different words for crying?

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

Carolyn Heilbrun

Christianity is not a system of philosophy, nor a ritual, nor a code of laws; it is the impartation of a divine vitality. Without the way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, without life there is no living.

Merrill C. Tenney

If we took the mission statements of 100 large industrial companies, mixed them up while everyone was asleep, and reassigned them at random, would anyone wake up tomorrow and cry, 'My gosh, where has our mission statement gone?'

Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank.

Not frowning battlement nor lofty tower,
Not trenches wide nor river running by-
Shall save a city from her foeman's power,
But her sons' valor and fidelity.

Niccolò Forteguerri

To some extent, of course, we are all impostors. We play roles on the stage of life, presenting a public self that differs from the private self we share with intimates and morphing both selves as circumstances demand. Displaying a facade is part and parcel of the human condition. Indeed, one reason the feeling of being an impostor is so widespread is that society places enormous pressure on people to stifle their real selves.

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

Simply put, the Prague Spring can be considered the forerunner of Eurocommunism, and the Czechoslovak reformers can be considered its forefathers in their attempt to create a model of socialism that, rooted in the Western tradition, differs from that of the USSR.

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.

Peter Conrad (academic)

In undertaking the conquest of self it is of the utmost importance to form strong bonds of habit between ideas and conduct.

If the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for the future, it is this," Mrs. Wohlstetter wrote in her book: "We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and live with it. No magic, in code or otherwise, will provide certainty.

Roberta Wohlstetter

Public administration is the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole or for some segments of it.

David H. Rosenbloom

Still, wouldn't you, even if entirely secure in your own sense of direction, be at least curious where others were heading, even as you struck out on your own ?

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith